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Well it's now released and - not entirely unworryingly - they've done nothing, whatsoever, about the performance issues people in the Beta have been reporting constantly.

It basically won't run if you have multiple GPUs - disable all-but-1 and you're in with the rest of us, a game with texture loading issues and a wildly varying framerate on just about any combination of hardware.

If you have a high-end rig the slowdown will causing stutter and annoy you - if you're on a lower-end system it will dip into single figure FPS from time-to-time - it's a bit of a mess.

The game underlying this is still amazing but it's rather worrying that all their BETA seems to have done is test-out the online infrastructure - whilst they've released a few updates the in-game version no never changed and the performance has remained 'problematic'.

Hmmmm - I think I'd have to say that until they sort the fps issues, offer a 'no shadows' option (because low shadows are ugly-as-hell and high-shadows destroy the framerate) and - well - listen to their customers, I'd stick with the XBOX version!

Really, Ubisoft Shanghai, really?
-The low FPS and stuttering problems are still here in full force. There seems to have been no improvement from beta.
-The multiplayer has adopted a habit of ejecting at least one player from the game, just before the match begins. I have felt its wrath a few times. To be fair it does work for the majority of matches.
-You might be randomly disconnected during a multiplayer match. I mostly see it happen to others, and am left to putter on ahead all by my lonesome. Hits a bit too close to home.
-This game (might have) blue screened my computer yesterday! This computer has never blue screened before in its three years of life. But the screen corrupted while playing and there it was.
-The game STILL fails to upload my times to the leaderboards about 3 in 10 times. This is really annoying when you just trounced all the times in your Friends leaderboard ;).
-Glad they had time to implement YouTube and Facebook integration, instead of... I don't know, addressing real needs.
-Their built-in YouTube feature is still terrible. It encodes into the mysterious WebQ format in 24 FPS, but looks like it's below that. It is quite fast though. Fast and ugly. No one wants to watch Trials footage with low FPS and bit rate.
-Browsing Track Central is still sluggish. I've seen claims that the 360 one is much more responsive.

Hooray for Bare Minimum Competence
-The opening video is now 1080p.
-The game now appears to render at your full chosen resolution (in my case: 1920x1080). Thus the image quality and textures are somewhat sharper. It's still no Crysis, but it's better than when it appeared to be upscaling from 720p in the beta.
-There was a day one patch that allegedly did things: http://forum.redlynx.com/forum/viewt...p?f=92&t=14486
-Uploads to the leaderboards now work most of the time, instead of almost never.
-Facebook integration, for those who want to be ignored by their nonplussed friends and family.
-Compared to the rest of the port: they did a good job implementing keyboard and mouse controls into the track editor. It still has shortcomings. Why can't I just type in a value, with my KEYBOARD; I don't want to use a slider.
-Controller support for Xinput-compliant devices appears to be excellent. You can switch back and forth between KB&M and a pad in real time. The prompts change instantly. My Logitech F310 works perfectly.
-There is now Steam friends integration. I'm not sure what this entails exactly. I think it might let you see your Steam friends in your leaderboards?

I cannot recommend the game, because of the poor port. If you purchase, you're gambling your money as even top-shelf rigs can experience stuttering. However, all of these issues haven't stopped me from playing the game for 80 hours so far. Fun conquers all. Warts of incompetency and all, it's still a laugh-riot. One of the best crazy-motorcycle-hippity-hop-over-barrel games ever made, if not the best. Note: I have the stutter/FPS problems too, but they're somewhat irregular. It has only adversely affected my ability in a handful of certain areas.

Redlynx forums are promising a graphical patch which they say will "work alongside driver updates to improve framerates across the board"

I have an open ticket with Ubisoft who insist I'm not using the latest AMD driver and that's the source of my problems - except that I am using the latest driver so GOD knows which driver they're talking about.

As it stands right now it's hard to recommend the PC version of Trials because the performance is abysmal on almost all PCs (even a high-end PC will see dips which affect performance) - and I'm pretty sure the race clock isn't frame-synced so those drops affect your overall time (e.g. you slow down but the clock doesn't)

I'm fairly sure it will get patched to some level of competence but it will probably be cheaper by the time that happens - the core game is still amazing but the state of the port is appalling.